Solo directorial debut screams for a more coherent vision
In adapting The Spirit to the screen Frank Miller has repeatedly stated his intention to stay true to the source material. He’s undoubtedly being sincere — by all accounts Miller and Eisner were good friends and he sees The Spirit’s creator as something of a mentor. Intentions are only half the battle though and the film version of The Spirit is torn between two visions.
Visually the film is pure Miller. Shot with the same real-actors-in-CGI-settings technology that brought Miller’s Sin City to life The Spirit borrows heavily —maybe too heavily — from that movie’s playbook using a muted palette with bursts of vivid colour to amp up the style. Entire fights play out in shadows. Rooftop sequences resemble two-dimensional comic panels. There’s enough visual panache that for awhile at least it’s easy to get swept up.
The trouble comes when the film tries to capture Eisner’s tone. While Miller and Eisner both borrow heavily from film noir Eisner’s take on the genre —namely the superhero strip The Spirit that he introduced to newspapers in the 1940s — is playful and goofy incorporating other genres even featuring haunted houses and whimsical adventures starring the strip’s secondary characters. Miller on the other hand takes the genre to its extreme an approach that works in books like Sin City but can get absurd when applied to other characters. See lines like “I’m the god damn Batman” in Miller’s current run on All Star Batman and Robin .
In The Spirit this leads to the hero (Gabriel Macht) growling about how the city screams for him in a piece of straight-out-of- Sin City narration one moment and then being smacked over the head with a toilet and getting stuck in the bowl in a cartoonish fight sequence minutes later. That Macht is equally comfortable with both styles is commendable but he resembles something closer to Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness than any Raymond Chandler character.
Few of the other actors even try to strike a balance between the film’s tones. Samuel L. Jackson is pure cartoon supervillain as The Octopus a bat-shit crazy geneticist bent on becoming a god (and obsessed with eggs for some reason). Scarlett Johanssen plays the straightman to Jackson’s colourful lunatic. Dan Lauria (the dad from The Wonder Years ) is in full-on noir mode as Commissioner Dolan. Eva Mendes is pretty much just eye candy (but then again so is most of the film).
It does all come together by turns. When Macht stops a purse snatcher and finds himself surrounded by adoring fans the look feel and energy gel in a perfect blend of screwball levity and ’40s grit. Most of the time though The Spirit battles itself. And a film divided against itself is a wasted opportunity.
